


Re:CONNECTION

by orphan_account



Series: After Crucible [6]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 15:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the peak of synthesis, the geth obtain more than Shepard's DNA; they manage to record her consciousness, too. </p>
<p>A post Synthesis one-shot about Garrus' time in that recording. Liberties are most certainly taken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Re:CONNECTION

Garrus had expected gray. He didn't get gray.

He didn't get the brown of her hair either, or the green of her eyes, or the olive of her skin. There was no red armour, no white loveliness, no black inclination towards destruction. Just a cloyingly bright shade of yellow that couldn't have been more discordant with his perception of Shepard. It was everywhere. Short yellow walls boxed themselves around yellow floors and a yellow ceiling. A yellow bed bordered by yellow night stands and lit up by yellow lamps served as the room's centrepiece. The dresser too was yellow, as was the bookshelf, as were the books. So on. So forth. 

Tucked into the bed was a little girl with ribbons in her hair, and beside her knelt a grown woman wearing a nightgown that flowed behind her like an endless bridal veil. She was singing, “ _You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray._ ” The song was yellow itself for the cheeriness of her delivery, but Garrus minded that much less; there was a raw, unassuming quality to it that lacked the artificiality of the rest of the room. It was kind of nice, actually. 

“ _You'll never know mom,_ ” the little girl sang, more enthusiastic but less in tune, “ _how much I love you._ ”

“ _So please don't take my sunshine away._ ” 

“Before,” Garrus said. 

The bed became a desk atop which sat a human-made terminal that was about twenty years old by Garrus' reckoning; he'd seen some like them in slums of Omega, refurbished and repurposed by people who couldn't afford anything newer, or better, or more intuitive to their own race. Seated at the desk was a teenage girl who was holding a small black box in her open palms. She kept it at a distance, viewed it with consternation. A man was in the room with her. There was a quirk of a familiar smile lifting his face, and his dark skin, his confidence, and the glory in his eyes were all hers, too. 

“Do you have to watch me do this?” 

“What, are you embarrassed about snorting dust in front of your father?”

Shepard groaned. “Dad!”

“The effects of eezo dust on adolescents first exposed to it in the womb are poorly documented. So even though top brass assures me that it won't harm you, I'd like to be here in case they're talking out of their asses.”

“Well that's … reassuring.”

“You asked for this, Jane. If you've changed your mind ...”

“No, I haven't. But – no, no buts. I'm ready.”

She opened the box.

Garrus sighed. “After.” 

The simulation went black, pitch black. It was better than yellow, a least for a moment. 

Until Shepard screamed. 

Were Garrus to collect all the pain he'd ever witnessed break through her staunch strength and combine it into a single force, the effect would pale beneath the power of her suffering then. It was, in a word, relentless. Trying to block it out helped nothing, covering his ears did nothing, adjusting his cybernetics did nothing; it was part of him as well. 

Pixel by pixel, the black was being replaced with a sandy shade of gold that coated the ground and rose in mountainous piles of pebbles and dust and debris. To his left, a thresher maw glitched into and out of existence, the memory of it overburdened by the weight of the corpses in its nest. To his right, atop a hill, partially hidden behind the corroded wreckage of a mako, was Shepard, who wasn't screaming anymore. 

As Garrus climbed the hill towards her, the scene began to distort, pixels dying one by one by one until all that remained was him, and Shepard, and the grayness and colour he had sought from the beginning. He wished that he could pull her into his arms and learn to remember the sound of her heartbeat, the weight of her body against his, the smell of her skin and its softness and its warmth. But that wasn't going to happen. Much of her armour had been corroded away, and her exposed skin was raw and red and wet but not very bloody. Her helmet was off. Her eyes and her mouth were frozen open; her lungs and her heart shut beneath them. Dead. 

“After,” he said. 

Wind swept through the scene, blowing the dust and the debris and the dead away to reveal a large yellow room, like a school gymnasium, empty but for a single girl who was flowing through its space like a ballerina. The dull light of biotics moved around her with the fluidity of water in Zero-G, and it cast the entire scene in a surreal golden glow. 

“Before,” he said. 

Nothing happened. No change in scenery, no shift in the wheres and whens of the moment until the girl looked at him, aware of his presence. Contrary to what he had thought, she wasn't a teenager. Or perhaps she had changed form in the time it took him to analyse her place in the timeline. There were no certainties, only befores and afters. 

Colour flickered around her. Brown hair, green eyes, olive skin. 

“What are you doing here, Garrus?” she asked in a voice that was stiff and fractured yet still managed to strike the right balance between softness and command. Garrus wanted less to answer her question and more to engage her in anything resembling conversation, but he couldn't move regardless, not even to complete the simple process of opening his mouth, positioning his tongue, and saying _hey there._ Whether it was due to shock, or reluctance, or despair; or whether it was because something inside of her was driving her to propel Garrus forward like a silent protagonist, she didn't afford him the opportunity to find his own words either and instead slammed his mind with a long legacy of visions. 

_Nihlus, mandibles raised; Nihlus, dead._

"Before."

_The man from earlier – the one who played the part of Shepard's father so perfectly he couldn't be anybody else – fading away on a slab of a bed._

"Before."

_Nonsense spouted from the holographic lips of an illusory child; three paths laid bare, a question asked:_ how would you like to kill yourself? _, not in those words exactly, but close enough._

"After." 

_A human back lined with scratch marks, some deep enough to draw blood. Sweat that must have made them sting. Human hands perched on bare shoulders, a little bit of blood still on the fingernails. Kaidan finished first then moved to bring about Shepard's release._

"Before."

_The Normandy welcoming Shepard as its Commander._

"Before."

_Thessia burning. Thessia dying. Thessia lost. Shepard bent over a terminal, her failure to save quickly becoming a failure to stand._

"After."

_Ghosts in a forest calling out to her with words meant to haunt her not simply within the confines of the dream but for time eternal._

“I don't know. Constant.”

_A flicker of red against a growing stem of ash. A red planet. A man in a suit, smirking._

"Before."

_A disconnected whisper._ ”Garrus,” _it said. Simple. Soft. Enticing._

Not before. Not after. 

Now. 

_Dim lights. Bureaucrats. Government employees. Keepers. A fountain. Two turians arguing about justice; one so handicapped by red tape that he'd lost before he begun. A human. Hope._

"Before."

_High above the Citadel beneath blue skies. There was traffic but neither of them cared because the sense of togetherness they were feeling was so thick and comforting that they were isolated beneath it, even as life thrived around them. She shoots. She misses. He celebrates. They love._

"After."

_Tears collected in her eyes. Garrus couldn't tell if they were sad or grateful so he pretended he didn't notice and poured her another glass of wine, told her another story about his team on Omega, and hoped that in doing so, he could help her think about Mordin and Thane again in a way that didn't hurt her quite so much._

“Before.”

_She smiles, one side of her mouth quirked higher than the other. Something about reach, something about flexibility, something about blowing off steam together – something about it all filling them both with the thrill of anticipation and the heat of arousal and the fluttering potential that something more existed between them, something quite like love._

"Before."

_Mercenaries skittered on the ground beneath them like cockroaches. There wasn't really time for them to catch up and establish who they were beyond their serendipitous status as allies, but she had been two years dead, and he had launched himself so far from the grid that she'd never have been able to find him on her own. They needed that connection. Through it they would fight harder, win better. They would live longer. They would remember hope._

"Before."

_The music stopped. She took the alcohol from his hand, put it down. Silenced his concerns by tracing the knotted ropes of his scar and pressing her forehead gently against his own._

"After." 

_Shepard's protocols for reunion were simple. A kiss at the side of his mouth, soft enough to tickle his mandibles, long enough to leave him wanting for more. His hands in hers. A smile. A joke. A return to business with the promise of pleasure._

"After."

More shared moments between them. Clandestine touches, fingertip to fingertip, forehead to forehead. Gentle fucks and lip-swelling kisses. Downtime spent together, side by side, where neither had to say anything, or do anything beyond exist. So many moments but never enough. 

It all ended with Garrus chasing Shepard into a beam of light and falling, falling, falling, while beneath him the white brightness burned Shepard black. As she dissipated into the complexity and emptiness of DNA he continued to fall, alone.

Then there was nothing.

Then there was this:

* * *

The Normandy's captain's quarters were normally an exercise in grayscale, but here they were almost as yellow as her childhood. Instead of ships, her display case was filled with photographs. The bed was messy; not simply unmade but in a state of chaos, all rumpled sheets and displaced pillows. Shepard sat amongst them. She wore a yellow sundress. A few lines of a single song – the one about sunshine and gray skies – played in repeat over the stereo.

It was all ludicrous. The liberties taken against reality. The existence of a Shepard who was herself enough for him to want to stay there with her, logistics be damned, but who was also too incompletely cognizant of her life to be much more than virtual. 

“You do know you can sit, right?” she asked. 

Garrus sat. As soon he settled into place, Shepard leaned forward and held out her palms to him. He didn't take them, instead gripping his knees, which made his shoulders tighter, his muscles more stiff.

“Garrus, it's fine.” 

He was poised to tell her that nothing about invading a virtual recording of her consciousness was particularly fine, and he was primed to bleed enough objection into the room that the cheeriness of its colouring at last became complaint with the grief-ridden absurdity of their circumstances. Everything was moving at the rapid speed of geth computation and Garrus was dizzied by the efficiency of it all. 

“So how do they look?” Shepard asked. “My memories.”

Case in point. 

“You know why I'm here,” he said, knowing that she shouldn't. 

“I'm kind of the reason you're here.”

“The geth told me they collected your consciousness the moment you synthesized. None of them mentioned that you're aware of what's happening to you.”

Shepard frowned. “Our wires must have crossed.”

“Shepard.”

“What?”

“It's just –“

The music shifted verse. 

_”The other night dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms,”_ sang a woman.

_”When I awoke dear, I was mistaken, and I held my head and cried,”_ sang a turian.

“– It's nothing.”

Garrus took a deep breath, slowly. Exhaled it even slower. Shepard leaned further forward so she could place her hands atop his own, burying her thumbs beneath his palms for leverage. “I've got something to show you, Garrus.”

Fixing him with a persistent stare and maintaining an insistent hold on his own hands, she slowly ebbed away at his reluctance until he gave into her, loosened his fingers, allowed her to lift his hands and press them tight into her own. 

“You know, it's cheating if you keep your eyes open.”

He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he was on an Earth he'd never seen before; whole and unmarred, blue and green and white. Yellow only in moderation. Shepard's hands were no longer folded over his own; she had taken to spinning in front of him instead. The way a child might, simply because it was more interesting than taking a straight path. Every time she met his eyes she smiled at him with a degree of peacefulness that filled him with love, with envy.

With grief. 

Shepard wasn't a whirlwind going at thousands of miles per hour, thousands of minutes per second, thousands of thoughts for each one Garrus managed; she was pure fire. Passion and verve and energy, rich with equal potential to warm or implode with a cruelty that denied her compassion. Like a sun, she burned slow and didn't spin. Things existed in her orbit, moving to the beauty of her brilliance, balanced by her steadiness, her reliability, her strength. 

He reached out and caught her hand with a gentleness that allowed her to make a clean stop in front of him. Shepard frowned. Garrus ran his thumb across the back of her hand expecting soft skin. What he felt could best be described as static. Real but not real. Tangible but not entirely solid. Shepard but not Shepard enough; synthetic to an extent that no longer aligned with the way of the galaxy. 

Garrus laced his talons between her fingers and maneuvered her so that she was standing by his side. He moved forward slowly, waiting for Shepard to fall into step. “Why don't you give me the official tour of Earth?” he asked. 

“I'm a space brat, Garrus,” she said. “The best I can do is point out the stars.” 

“I'll take it. On the condition that you make it up to me later.” 

The life in his voice was masterful; award worthy. Shepard buried her face in his shoulder as they walked, and he could feel her smile into the crook of his neck. Which just made him more aware of how much he didn't want to continue, how nice it would be to just stop and stay and pretend that there wasn't another world out there waiting for him to return to it empty-handed, empty-hearted. He whispered, “I love you” against the shell of her ear, and then he sobbed. Quietly, but too loud to evade notice. 

The illusion shattered. 

She pulled away, positioned herself in front of him again. Dropped his hand. Said “Garrus” with so much clarity it made him ache. 

“Yeah, Shepard?”

“Am I wearing a sundress?”

He nodded. “You are.”

“It's yellow.”

“It is.” 

She pulled away and spun around again, this time with the slowness and the deliberateness of someone lost in an unfamiliar place. “This isn't Earth.”

“No. Probably not.”

She smiled a smile that said _I know what's coming next_ , and he felt his mandibles fall. The difference between humans and turians, Shepard and Vakarian, never more cleanly stated than in their manners of acceptance. “I need you to promise me something, Garrus.”

“Anything for you.”

“Live well,” she said in a voice that was strong for its allowance of sadness in its solidity. “Find happiness. Be great.” 

“This isn't goodbye, Shepard.”

“Of course it's not. You still owe me that drink.”

It was meant to be funny and light, he knew, but it was hard to feel relief at the edge of an end. Ever intuitive, Shepard moved her hands to his shoulders, rising up to rest her forehead against his own. Garrus relaxed into the touch, allowing himself this brief respite from mourning, first until it became the lengthy embrace of two lovers soon parted, and then until he could feel his consciousness unravelling from Shepard's irrevocably glitched mind. 

It wasn't goodbye.

* * *

Garrus didn't immediately awaken. Instead, he kept to the blackness behind his eyes because that was where the white sensations of Shepard still lingered. She was curled up inside of him, pillowed against his heart. Resting, finally resting. Another part of her digitized apologies through him like a virus, infecting the warmth of her existence with a shiver of wrongness that was still better than nothing. Then there were her _I love yous_ , sometimes desperate, sometimes silly, sometimes euphoric.

Always sincere. 

The geth were in the room with him and he could hear them moving around as they checked his monitors and began powering down his connection to their graybox, to Shepard. Soon he would have to tell them that their extraction of Shepard was too imperfect for their resurrection to proceed, but not yet. 

Now was the final stage of her slow burn. And he was going to live it until he, too, reduced to ash.


End file.
